The present invention generally relates to sharing of customer service resources during periods of high demand. For decades, certain public safety agencies, such as fire departments, have agreed to provide mutual assistance during emergency situations. Thus when one local fire department has a massive fire emergency, that department can call upon its neighbors to provide assistance. If the neighboring departments are willing and able to assist, then the emergency can be abated, and the assisting department can come to expect assistance if they should later experience an emergency. In the past, similar efforts at mutual assistance have been attempted in other industries, but to a less effective level. A hurdle to effective sharing of resources has previously been the need to physically deliver the needed resources to a distant location. With the expansion of telecommunications resources, effective transfer of communications between call agents can be accomplished without the necessity for the agents to physically travel.
Businesses needing to provide customer service resources must balance the projected need for those resources by customers with the cost of providing customer service resources at low demand periods, or when resources are not actually utilized by customers. A number of enterprises may be faced with occasions when demand for customer service far exceeds their ability to supply that service. Such occasions may include time of natural disaster, product recalls, or civil disruption, and the enterprises involved may be utilities, banks, transportation systems, health departments, government agencies, and non-governmental entities such as the Red Cross.
A continuing problem for electric utilities are periods containing an extremely high volume of requests for customer service agents during times of service disruption, e.g. when electric power is interrupted by storm damage. Presently, most “high volume call answering” (HVCA) is carried out using interactive voice response (IVR) systems (or an interactive call system (ICS), where the customer call is routed to an automated answering system. Such IVR systems are effective essentially for only expected types of customer requests, such as service outage reporting. When a customer has a situation requiring assistance that was not anticipated by the IVR administrators, or when the customer is unable to effectively navigate the IVR system, in most cases when HVCA systems have been activated, the customer cannot be routed to a live customer service representative (CSR) simply because no such representative is available. The customer is forced to leave a voicemail message, the response time to which may be very slow, due to the low availability of agents. Moreover, during the initial phases of an emergency, customers are known to be relatively patient, and accepting of the HVCA message systems, but as additional time passes, customers become increasingly frustrated by the perceived or actual unresponsiveness of their serving utility. For publicly regulated utilities, there may actually be regulatory standards requiring efficient response to customer inquiries, and failure to meet those standards can lead to penalties, or potentially lost customers. Similar situations where high incoming customer contacts overwhelm customer service capacity occur in other industries, such as in transportation where storms disrupt departures, or in banking where a technical problem may lead to unforeseen high call volumes.
The problem of dealing with HVCA is most pronounced in the electric utility industry, where natural disasters can severely disrupt service for the single provider of an area. Other utilities, such as telecommunications, cable television, water and natural gas may be to a lesser extent disrupted. During a service disruption, while one utility may have an extremely high volume, a utility located in another geographic region may have a relatively low volume of contacts requesting a customer service agent. Unfortunately, a number of obstacles have prevented utilities from sharing access to customer service agents with other utilities in need of assistance. One obstacle is the wide variety of interfaces that customer service agents of various utilities utilize on the computer systems that provide information about particular customers that are contacting the utility. In order for the customer service agents of one utility to assist customers of another utility, those agents would first need to be trained on how to utilize the interface of the utility being assisted. Advance preparation would be desirable, and in order to have that preparation, it would be necessary to anticipate which utility may be likely to provide assistance. In terms of emergency outages, predicting when, where, and the extent of outages is extremely difficult, and impossible to accomplish with any reliability.
Another obstacle are barriers in agreeing to terms, metering, timing, and compensation, for instance, between utilities that might wish to provide support for another utility having an emergency need. For instance, if mutual assistance is needed for only a few hours, by the time two parties might agree on the terms under which they might provide assistance in responding to customer service contacts, the emergency situation may already have been resolved. If the emergency situation continues for an extended period, presently, it is common for customer service agents to travel to the location of the emergency (or the customer service facility of the utility needing assistance), and thus added costs related to travel, housing, and inconvenience are incurred. In industries such as airlines or banking, companies with a shortage of customer service capacity may be direct competitors, and be reluctant to assist a competitor when an emergency arises. Public agencies, for instance the Federal Emergency Management Agency and local governments may not be able to immediately provide assistance because of statutory prohibitions. Thus, it would be desirable to organize an exchange system prior to an event that would allow for rapid activation of sharing of customer resources.
Yet another obstacle is the need to change call center resources on an as-needed basis. A utility may even require additional resources beyond those initially engaged in response to an emergency. For example, a utility responding to another utility experiencing a crisis by providing live agents may at some point need to retrieve those agents in order to deal with its own emergency. Current call routing systems do not enable flexible utilization of resources on a minute-to-minute basis.
Even if terms concerning mutual assistance could be agreed upon prior to the occurrence of an emergency, telecommunications connectivity issues have generally prevented one utility from directly transferring a customer service telephone call to another utility. This barrier is particularly acute when utilities seeking to provide mutual assistance are utilizing different telephone carriers. Utilities have been unable to transfer a call from an AT&T analog carrier to, for instance a responding provider that utilizes another carrier, for instance, Sprint. Even if the interface could be accomplished, yet another barrier is the need to actively allocate use of resources between a party needing assistance, and a party willing to provide assistance, while still retaining the ability to service its own customers. Existing systems for call forwarding between call center locations do not provide for unrelated operations to rapidly and in near real-time set up and activate call transfer program or campaigns. An example of an existing system with such limitations is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,349,134.
There exists an acute need for a system and method that would allow various providers to share capacity for addressing customer inquiries by providing mutual assistance in times of need. Of particular need is a system that allows rapid activation of mutual assistance, minimizes communications connectivity issues, and does not require a provider of mutual assistance to disrupt its own customer service activities or displace its customer service agents. If a system for providing mutual assistance between companies with trained customer service agents, particularly for utilities that experience high call volumes during certain events were available, customer service could be more efficiently provided.